October

by Zoe Wicomb

  Mercia remembers the old women, two of them she thinks, and the child, Sylvie, who lived in the wobbly-walled whitewashed house with gingham curtains. No hollyhocks, of course, but on the stoep with its makeshift verandah there was a painted paraffin tin with something growing—was it a vygie? or a malva?—something that may or may not have flowered. There was certainly the little girl, Sylvie, barely a toddler, who skipped about chatting and singing to herself, her head like that of the cockerel bobbing this way and that. Her bonnet tied under her chin hung by its slack straps on her back. As a child, Mercia had not dared take off her own bonnet with its stitched, starched brim framing her face to keep the sun out, and the pleated flap at the back for protecting her neck. Her mother had sewn a pretty picot edging all around the bonnet, so that there was no question of not being grateful, but how she admired the child who had tossed the thing off her head, in spite of an aproned Willemse auntie scolding from the doorway. There was often an old woman sitting in the doorway, elbows on parted knees and chin propped in her palms, surveying the world.

  The full thorn at the end of the lane that features in Sylvie’s photographs was the only other tree in the area. Mercia, the child, assumed that it had been planted by the auntie who worked in town. That was what any association with town brought—something different, something desirable like the dappled shade of the thorn tree where goats gathered to munch at mimosa balls. So much more leafy than her father’s tree at the dipkraal. Mercia cannot remember the names of the Willemse sisters, the women whom others gossiped about. She has an idea that there was sometimes a man under the tree, beavering away at something or other, so that she would not go closer, but all was recollected in the yellow fragrance of mimosa that kept her transfixed then, and now drifts about the photographs spilled out of the envelope.

  Father said it was rude to loiter and stare; he said that she should keep away from the Namaquas. Mercia would nevertheless wander the length of the lane—really it was the bed of an ephemeral stream that seldom carried water—hoping to see into people’s houses. She would slink past, as close to the open doors as she dared, hoping not to be seen, not to encounter anyone. Once a Willemse auntie whom she had not seen sitting in the dark interior called out, but she took fright and darted off. What she had glimpsed was shelves of painted enamel plates on white paper, possibly newspaper, hanging down a few inches and prettily cut out, so that light from outside picked out the white lacy pattern.

  There must have been something about the little girl’s carefree darting about the yard, bare-headed, the tinkle of her voice as she scolded the bantam cock, that Mercia envied, that made her own circumscribed days seem all the more oppressive, every day being like a Sunday, the day of prayer and of wearing shoes. There is still something of that carefree child in these photographs, something that stirs pity for the plight of the older Sylvie. Mercia feels her chest tightening. It does no good peering into the past, stirring spurious feelings of nostalgia. Then, inexplicably, something of Nettie enters, something of her own mother, and it takes the jolt of the photographs, the many faces of Sylvie cascading to the floor, for Mercia to start, to bristle against the nostalgia for that which never was.

  For Nettie’s love was distant, concentrated into picot edging or a scrap of frill on the clothes she sewed for her daughter. At the time of her mother’s death Mercia felt little more than puzzlement, for in death Nettie seemed not much more remote than she did in life.

  Nicholas insisted that the children look at the corpse, at the face that once was their mother’s. Mercia’s answer of no, that she had no wish to see, was squashed by her father’s yes, it was required, the paying of respect to the dead. And it was grotesque—the stillness of the waxy skin and the orifices plugged with cotton wool against corruption—that face like a photograph of Nettie. The stranger, already a ghost, was not her mother, was an absence felt through an image, and the very place where the corpse lay, the place occupied by someone who once was Nettie, ceased to be real, drawn by the corpse into its absence. The twelve-year-old child felt the thrall of placelessness. Ghostly and vague as it was, it whispered the promise of escape from the dreariness of Kliprand and the vulgarity of apartheid.

  Unlike Jake, it was impossible for Mercia to summon the tears she was expected to shed for her mother. For him Nettie’s death was devastating. How, he sobbed on Mercia’s shoulder, was he to live with the old man without her? Jake was too young to be motherless, and whilst Mercia for a while tried to indulge him, the demands of adolescence and of political resistance took over. By her late teens she had all but forgotten about Nettie, indeed other than in the role of progenitor, dismissed the very idea of a mother as being redundant. Mercia shrugs. It worked for her, so she will not now be bullied by nostalgia into believing otherwise.

  Mercia picks up the photographs, the many faces of Sylvie, shuffles them into a neat pile. How sure the girl seems to be of herself, of her own attractiveness. Has Sylvie never had any doubts? Heavens, the painful self-consciousness of Mercia’s own teens seems not so long ago. It was only in her nineteenth year that she began to think of herself as passable, that she dropped her shoulders and lifted her head, still barely presentable, and peering out through the disguise of a pressed fringe held fixed at night with cello-tape, saw in the world something that could after all be managed. Yes, given the right tools, she began to see her way clear to glorious escape. All that guilt and fear of childhood, the unwieldiness of adolescence, that was where ugliness lurked, that was what she would put behind her as generic, for really, now as a student, free of her family (she would see them only occasionally), the possibility of beauty beckoned at her. Like the night—she sang, drunk with poetry—that covers all defects in the mystery of darkness, she would walk in beauty, and keep fear at bay. If it was perhaps the other way round, if it was the promise of escape that bestowed beauty, what did it matter? She would not be bound by place; she could and she would get away; motherless, she was free to do as she pleased.

  And now, how that self-belief wags a mocking finger. The scholarship in Scotland that was meant to be no more than a break from the oppressiveness of home led to Craig and lifelong exile. From the start Craig was for keeps. After all the short-lived, disappointing dalliances with unsuitable young men, she knew that this was different. And Craig was not afraid of saying it out loud, as he playfully—touch wood—knocked on her head: we are for keeps. Which even allowed her a year of research in the USA and for him, traveling in Europe. Theirs was not the kind of relationship that restricted each other. And fortunately for both, having groped their way through childhood and adolescence, they were sure that they wanted no children of their own.

  Apartheid meant that there were no discussions about where they would live, about which one of them would give up his or her home. Thereafter, Craig was evasive about emigrating. It was only sensible to wait and see how things developed, and Mercia, by then engrossed in her work, was patient, and did not note how time had crept up on them, for they were what is known as a happy couple. What then had gone wrong? Where and how had she failed? Mercia has gone over the questions too many times. She must accept that the condition of having been left is about being left with unanswerable questions. Like flies to wanton gods etcetera, or plain old shit happens, as they say these days. She is sure that the question of how things had gone wrong would not have detained Craig. His concern was the setting to rights: the new woman, necessarily younger, who had somehow slipped into his life, and made the old intolerable, expendable. All he needed to worry about was the mechanics of replacement, how to sever things in a civilized, sophisticated fashion, without the messiness of tears and howling hysteria. Mercia thinks enviously of Sylvie, who, when she finally accepts her rejection, will hurl herself at the heavens, rail and rage and tear Jake apart. How satisfying, how cathartic that must be.

  Mercia sits up straight. She must not think of herself as an abandoned woman, an old woman, whose thighs have spread and who sits with her legs com
fortably apart, hands folded on her stomach. It is that image that drives her, reluctantly, to the gym. It has irritated her that even Smithy has read her visits to the gym in terms of a quest for a new man.

  Don’t be ridiculous, she snapped, there are ways of overcoming loneliness without burdening yourself with a strange burk. I’m warding off osteoporosis, that’s all. Oh, and a potbelly too.

  Well, that’s wonderful, Smithy said with her usual clapping together of hands, no need then for me to have a sign made for the rear window of your car: Abandoned woman at the wheel.

  Together they had laughed at the ludicrous warnings on cars. It was important to Mercia that Smithy, a bona fide mother, agreed on the Child on Board signs. What on earth could such complacent parents have in mind? How naïve the belief that otherwise reckless drivers would slow down in deference to their parenthood. Did they not know that it made any sensible person want to crash right into them and their precious brats?

  Mercia flicks once more through the photographs. It is not, she consoles herself, like reading someone’s letters, which she would never do. Photographs are already public, already an objectification of the person, meant to be looked at, so that she cannot see why anyone should mind; indeed, Sylvie presumably wants them to be admired. These pictures are all of Sylvie, taken by Sylvie herself, as if she is alone in the world, not lonely, just the only one left, having shooed everyone else out of the way to celebrate her aloneness.

  There is one of her in a butcher’s shop surrounded by sausage that she surveys with pride, pleased as punch at the fine career of butchery ahead of her. Mercia stops at another of the girl leaning against the kitchen wall that had been painted in bands of sky blue and grass green, no doubt, from the flaunting look, her own, recent handiwork. The old Willemse sisters must by then have been too tired to care. Provocative, all the pictures, with a pouting sexuality and devil-may-care stance that cannot be imagined from the careworn Sylvie of today. Mercia looks more closely. Yes, there it is in the corner, the edge of a set of shelves clad in lacy fabric. It does not seem like newspaper cutout; rather, white oilcloth she thinks, with pretty scalloped edges, nicely referencing the old newspaper.

  Mercia is about to shove the photographs back into the envelope when her eye catches one in black and white, a curious picture, taken at night, with the girl in a white T-shirt rising ghostly out of placeless darkness. The foreground on the right is a solid black blur, probably a rock on which the camera has been positioned, for a jagged stone edge, having caught the lens, is projected as a shadow onto the girl’s white T-shirt. Sylvie is positioned behind an old wire fence just visible on the left as a few hexagons of chicken wire. Loosely strung above it is a slack line of barbed wire, which cuts across her chest. Her torso is slightly angled; her right ear catches the camera’s flash, as do her teeth, shown in a stiff, artificial grin.

  Out of the darkness behind the girl, the only form picked out by the flash is the outline of a tree, so strange and stark and otherworldly that it appears as the negative of an image, its bare branches bearing unreal clusters of broad leaves here and there. Might it be a wild fig? Above the tree, to the right, and at the top of the photograph is an effulgent patch of light in the sky. Mercia does not know enough of the night sky; she would like to think that it is the heavy luminosity of the Milky Way.

  The photograph is extraordinary. It is of a Sylvie whom Mercia does not know and cannot fathom. A strange young woman in knowing performance who claims for herself an iconic presence in the ethereal light, then subverts it with a grin. Or is it an ironic grimace? The light in the sky, resonating as it does with the eerie, flashlit figure, might almost be an aureole cut adrift, carelessly tossed into a painterly scene, and askew in its ascent to heaven. Sylvie’s loose white T-shirt, rising out of black rock where the camera must have been placed, displays below the barbed wire the outline of a target printed in black lines across her chest. For all the girl’s lack of education, the photographic figure is imbued with language: I am alone in the world; I cannot be touched; I am transfigured.

  The barbs of the wire bore through her T-shirt, sink into her flesh, into this representation of Sylvie the saint who will pluck out the barbs without flinching. Sylvie the invincible.

  What is it that the girl knows? There is more than self-reflexivity, something beyond the knowing aesthetics of representing the self. There is knowledge that crosses over from the ghostly world of the photograph, that flicks across eerily into the real, now a flickering shadow across Mercia’s heart. A shadow of fear and awe. Who is this apparition who rises out of the darkness, whose bright, ironic grin haunts the viewer? Who is Sylvie?

  Mercia shoves the photographs back into the envelope just in time. She has not heard the click of the gate, the crunch of footsteps, until the girl struggles noisily, heavily into the house with a newspaper parcel that she draws out of a shopping bag. After the ethereal picture, the solid figure and drawn mouth seem to exude a bitterness that makes Mercia flinch.

  A lekker brawn for tomorrow, Sylvie announces. Some tripe and trotters.

  Does the girl think of nothing but food? No wonder she has grown so heavy. How can it be that there is no trace of the extraordinary figure of the photographs? Then Mercia screams involuntarily as Sylvie unwraps the newspaper parcel and triumphantly holds up a scraped sheep’s head, its eyes staring glassily out of the mottled gray-black skin. Sylvie throws her head back with laughter. It’s only a sheep’s head. I’m going to cook it with the trotters for brawn. Very nice, flavored with a bit of curry powder, and it’s something that Jake really likes. You’ll see how he’ll jump out of bed for brawn. She looks up at Mercia’s frozen face. What’s the matter, she says, you must have seen a sheep’s head before? There is unmistakable scorn in her voice, so that Mercia does not trust herself to reply. Then, seeing the child asleep on the sofa, Sylvie shouts, Ag no, man, this is no time to be sleeping. She shakes his shoulder until his eyes open. This reading and writing business is too much for him, too tiring for a small boy, she says.

  Nicky sits up muttering; he rubs his eyes, and looks around bewildered. Mercia takes his hand. Come, she says, we’re going to help your mummy to make brawn.

  Just then Jake shouts from the room: Sylvie, come. Where are you? Sylvie, come, quick.

  Mercia wants to plug her fingers into her ears. This, the sound of her own people, this is what she needs to get away from.

  Mercia is sent out of the kitchen by Sylvie, who says that she doesn’t need any help, that it won’t do having a child perched on a chair with a knife in his hand.

  It’s a blunt dinner knife, Mercia protests, but Sylvie the mother says, Whoever has heard of a child chopping onions? She helps Nicky down and turns on the television, with a warning that he is not to fall sleep.

  What is happening to Mercia, the carnivore, here in Kliprand? Is this the measure of her distance from the place, from her home, her people? The smell of meat and onions boiling in her mother’s old cast-iron pot from Falkirk makes her gag, so that she goes out to the very end of the garden where Sylvie has planted a frangipani. It is still young; its stark bare branches like amputated limbs against the evening sky conjure up the legendary demons and ghosts of long-dead slaves from the east. From some of the puckered stumps, clenched fists of flower have pushed their way out, the perfume of the young buds still locked away. Mercia wills a remembered fragrance to drive off the smell of sheep’s head and trotters. Which can’t be so different from any cut of mutton cooking, but the smell is inexorably linked to the image of the hideous head.

  Is Mercia growing fastidious about meat, about the killing of animals? She doesn’t know. This is home; everything is topsyturvy here. She would like to think that it is only the head, the face that is after all so like a human’s, that is repellent. She remembers, as a child at Sunday school, the picture card of John the Baptist’s severed head on a plate, which made her stomach turn. Hideous and barbaric, she thought, and squeezed shut her eyes, although the
afterimage of curly hair and beard, and glassy eyes, would not go away. Even years later, in Italian museums, she winced at the paintings, Caravaggio’s and others’. Botticelli’s held her in frozen horror, foregrounding as it did a sweetly smiling Salome holding the head on a plate. Focusing on the richly adorned rim of the plate, Mercia understood that it was indeed the plate, that statement of cultural refinement, that doubled the horror.

  No danger of a gilt plate tonight. Sylvie will cook the head with onions and spices, and the meat floating in the jellied liquor will be picked from skin and bone, so that there could be no picturing of the head in the brawn. But it makes her gorge rise all the same. Transformed in the cooking it may be, but Mercia knows that she will not be placated. The problem is how to get round it, how not to offend Sylvie.

  She returns to the question of why she finds meat difficult to eat here in Kliprand. It is not only the head. The faint nausea that has gripped her over the last couple of days is undoubtedly linked to meat. Is it connected with Sylvie, the butcher girl?

  Back home in Glasgow, Mercia had no such misgivings about meat. She would pound ginger and garlic with cumin and cardamom in a marble pestle and mortar for her signature dish of Moroccan lamb, having herself pickled the lemons, quartered and salted and packed snugly in their own juice some months before. Lately, she has made a point of continuing to have friends round to dinner; she would not retreat into lone spinsterhood. Besides, there was the relief of having no Craig to appease, Craig who so loved dinner parties, but always, always complained beforehand. Always complained that he’d had enough, that he hated the fuss and bustle, that it was too much trouble, that they should think of an excuse to call off the dinner party. Please could she say that he had pneumonia. Or a brain tumor. So that she shut him out of the kitchen.